Touch Tapping Tabs

[GtrVampyre]

Iv heard it called 2 names (two hand tapping and touch tapping) but two hand tapping reminds me of just regular old tapping cause your using two hands. So ill just use touch tapping when i refer to it ^.^.

Anyways, iv been real interested in touch tapping (stanley jordan, adam fulara) and so iv read articles and got everything set up but i can only find ONE touch tapping tab, i was lucky it was a guitar pro tab but i cant find anymore, wether they are powertab, guitar pro, or regular tabs. Anyone have any links to where i can find some touch tapping tabs or if anything maby a book i could buy that has some tabs in it? Thanks!

[lemur821]

It's usually called touch style, two-handed tapping, or just tapping. I kind of like "touch style" myself.

I don't know where you can find tabs, but how about getting some Bach or something? Simple piano music would work well.

Edit: Of course, you'd probably have to rearrange the piano music.

Now that I think some more, Midnight and Day at the Beach are some good tapping songs by Joe Satriani. They're both at http://powertabs.net.

[GtrVampyre]

yeah, im learning midnight now, i love that song :). Day at the beach is pretty awesome too, thanks for the recommendations! If anyone knows of any more cool tapping songs, lemme know :) Thanks...

[traktor]

I'm only aware of two things that *might* be useful to you --

1) Frank Joliffe (touchstyle publications) has or had a songbook and a newsletter with songs. These songs were in both standard notation (notes on staves) and tab, as best I recall. I don't know if these are still available. See http://touchstyle.com for more info.

2) If you'd consider throwing aside the limitations of tab, you'd gain a lot. Tab is, by definition, a piece of music that someone has read or worked out and then they went to the trouble to regurgitate it for you in a simple form for an illiterate musician. That's right. A person who cannot read is an illiterate. They don't know the litters (letters). So a musician who cannot read the litters (notes on staves) is an illiterate musician. (Don't get too mad at me; I cannot read all that well myself.) There is *no* advantage in being illiterate. In fact, it is a severe handicap in our society, and in your musical life.

Especially since learning to read (notes) is not actually all that difficult. Just as in the first grade, you have to start with something simple (See Spot run. Run, Spot, run! Funny, funny Spot!), you must start with some simple notes. There are several good approaches to do this.

a) Children's piano books (the Jolly Farmer, Chopsticks)

b) Bartok books (strange sounding cool small pieces)

c) Sheet music magazine, easy piano version.

I used the magazine, buying back issues of these (simple) two handed piano arrangements, generally with one note at a time in each hand, simple time signatures, and simple keys with few sharps and flats. (You *will* need some kind of introduction to music notation, perhaps a book or a teacher.) You paper-clip all the songs in C, then go through them, working out notes (for both hands), regardless of how slow it is. When one song is done, go to the next. As you go along, there comes a day when you can play them at reasonable speed. You can now read music.

Hope you fine some of this useful.

[GtrVampyre]

LoL, i guess im just taking the easy way out with tabs cause i CAN read sheet music cause iv been in band at school for...6 years now and my mom has a piano and i play piano so i can read most sheet music (i just have trouble with the beat durations such as dotted eights and 3 quarters and such) but as far as notes go on sheet music i can read it. I just much rather go by tabs cause its quicker for me and i can spend more time learning the piece but i guess if i learned it by sheet music more often id get better at it. (i also know the whole "whole note, half note,quarter note" durations just i sometimes trip up on that stuff..

[traktor]

In high-school (that would be 1957-1961) I was a rudimental drummer. I didn't have to learn the notes going up and down but I did have to learn the note durations.

It was either my band director Mr. Brooks or it was a teacher from whom I took some drum lessons, but one of them showed me an easy way to break down the counting.

Let's assume that the time signature is 4/4, meaning four beats to a measure and using a quarter note to show each of these beats.

Then if you had four quarter notes, you'd count 1 - 2 - 3 - 4, and play a note on each beat. Pretty simple, yes?

But what if you counted like this --
1 - e - and - a
2 - e - and - a
3 - e - and - a
4 - e - and - a

That is, you broke every quarter note down into four sounds? You'd still be tapping on the 1, 2, 3, 4, but you're already breaking the measure down to sixteenth notes, just in the way you mentally count it.

Then, if you had a dotted quarter (or a quarter tied to an eight) you'd just let one an a half of these counts go by.

Try it. You'll like it.

(And of course, after doing this a bit, you'll discover that you just look at the measure and you *know* how that rhythm sounds, because there are only so many rhythms.)

This system works on the assumption that you'll not often encounter notes faster than sixteenth, which seems pretty true if you look at lead sheets in fake books or if you look at two-stave piano music.

[GtrVampyre]

Thanks for the tip, ill have to try that out ^.^. I play precussion in band but i tend to do things by sound. Ill listen to someone else play it once maby twice and memorize it or make up my own snazzy beat. =P

[traktor]

Well, I'm the same way.

However, this works in your favor, too. What happens with this "analyse by rhythmic counting" method is that most of the common rhythms present themselves to you fairly soon, and before long you just glance at the pattern and you "know" or maybe "hear" what that's supposed to sound like, and at that point somehow the counting fades away ...

[rjgoos]

My parents once belonged to a small rural church. They had no keyboard player, so my mother wrote out the hymns on pages for a 3-ring binder, put the chord changes (C, F, G, etc.) above the lyrics, put her autoharp and binder on the podium, and played the autoharp and led the music. It was really cool, actually. My mother was a vocal music major in college.

A couple of truck drivers (brothers) started attending. In a rural church, everybody has to pitch in, so shortly thereafter they were standing behind my mom, with their guitars. She would just start playing the next song, and they would listen for a measure or two, and eventually they would be following along. And, follow along they could, quite well.

One day, she overheard them talking while huddled around the 3-ring binder. "What are those letters written above those words?" One of the truck drivers asked. "What's wrong with you", the other replied, dead serious, "can't you read music?"

It is a true story.

R. Jay Goos

[mrINFINITY]

hehe, that's a pretty good story rjgoos.

traktor,

I try telling guitarists what you're saying all the time and about 75% of them tell me it would just inhibit their playing?!? explain that one :P. They always just say they don't wanna be 'stuck' on the page. I'm in college now and have been playing since I've been in junior high and I can dang near sight-read a grand staff on a regular classical guitar. It only helps when you need a large repertoire. If you only have a few songs memorized and can sight-read well, you're repertoire just increased by thousands and thousands of songs, you just gotta get the notation for them. nothing wrong with transcribing songs of course, but limiting yourself to that seems kinda lazy (no offense to any of you guys out there that don't read).